InAEA 2011 May Meeting Minutes

DISCUSSION: What are students learning and what are we teaching? What else is needed to prepare students for their future?

SageStage Minotaur: Teaching another is a way to learn. The youth in creating YouTube tutorials are learning as they are teaching.

Sandrine Han: yes, their tutorial is improving every time… they are also learning from their video commends…

SageStage Minotaur: When I am doing more learning in preparing for teaching than my students then I know I need to re-evaluate my pedagogical approach so my students are teaching themselves and each other. This is when they are intrinsically motivated and the learning is internalized/long lasting.

Sandrine Han: I think, if their art teachers know about their ability, they should have a better way to guide these students…

SageStage Minotaur: When I was teaching grad students Adobe Director, I ask my sons to teach themselves in the morning, and provide an example to take to the art teachers that afternoon. They were 10 & 12 years old and learned the program and made examples.

I wasn’t really teaching Director, but that was the tool to use for the ideas I was introducing to them about public pedaogy, dynamic visual metaphors, etc.

Marylou Goldrosen: KIds are not aware of the content of their work — ie when kids at Boys & Grirls CLub thought it was joke to burn up houses in SimsII game, until I showed them all the local Fire Calls –the same ones as in the game. Then it wasn’t so funny. This is soon to be published. They need critical guidance

I have learned in class to have a gifted student demonstrate and then I fill them in later on common problems. I don’t have to do all the introduction now

SageStage Minotaur: Responsibility for what we produce, considering its meaning and to whom, are important to the critical reflective process, and directing to real life statistics, events, how wars and hatred are fueled, etc.

Students learned about Second Life and changed their avatars. In our class space in Penn State Isle 2, we set up a meeting space where students can acquire free clothes and tools, learn how to change their avatars, and basic functions about Second Life. This project asks students these questions:

Our body is as political as it is physical. The physical form is a political form. What is an avatar? An amplified or hollowed body? Organic body-matter, silicon-base, or alloy? Voluntary, involuntary, controlled, programmed–all four working in concert? In what ways is political agency performed in the avatar that you created? If we watch our self act through our avatar (i.e., we can watch our avatar’s movements and expressions), how far is our avatar’s acting outside of self? Is it self-survey or self-surveillance? Narcissistic? What were the limits of representation in the SL avatar application?

The creation and performance of avatars in virtual environments can stretch open the borders of comfortably incorporated frames of knowing.

Making (studio) is a way of knowing and learning that I value too. There are many decisions in the process. The art teacher can help students see their decision-making process, and help them consider the meanings, responsibility, and consequences of what they put out into the world.

Filming machinima does not need to be limited to SL, so it is not SL per se, but concepts, processes, and purposes that are important. For example, Critical and creative production of machinima can envision what can be changed about the world. Also, in this project we begin to study filmic techniques as visual strategies for revealing power and privilege in our cultural narratives created as machinima.

Kimberly Dark’s story telling performances on YouTube are examples I use in preparing for machinima projects, as well as Global Kids.

Marylou Goldrosen: Yes — Global Kids joined with the Nonprofits to open it up soon for their teens –to be mentors and iterns there –responsibility and play

SageStage Minotaur: The reflections of the teachers about their students in lessons on contemporary art as public pedagogy in my online course this spring showed for example that in a first grade class in China the children “enjoyed finding objects to alter their environment.”